When talking trash in Montgomery County, Maryland, the plan had long been that the incinerator would stop operations when the current agreement with its operator, Reworld Montgomery, was set to expire in 2026.
Now, it looks like the facility in Dickerson will keep burning county waste for as long as another five years — until 2031.
Steven Findlay is president of the Sugarloaf Citizens Association and said the group’s members, who live within miles of the industrial site that’s home to the incinerator, are unhappy about the expected delay.
“In the beginning, the incinerator was a technology that was quite useful. But this is a very old facility now, and there are much better ways of reducing the volume of trash,” Findlay said.
He said “it’s time” for the incinerator to be closed.
“The county is well aware that it’s time to close the incinerator. The argument is really down to timing,” Findlay said. “We’d would like to see the incinerator closed in the next three to four years.”
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich has said he wants the county to close the incinerator before he leaves office.
“I suspect that’s going to be difficult to do it in two years, but we’ll see,” Findlay said. “Negotiations around this are actively underway.”
Elrich made his intentions to close the incinerator clear before November’s election, in which he was effectively term limited. Elrich is currently in the second year of his second term which ends at the end of 2026.
Findlay and the Sugarloaf Citizens Association said the county is in a “bit of a dilemma.”
Findlay told WTOP that incinerators are big pieces of machinery that pollute “quite copiously, and they are hard to shut down once you become reliant on them with respect to the volume of trash they burn.”
But Findlay argued that if the county moves “aggressively” to shift to some other methods, it could close the incinerator before 2031.
The incinerator burns about 550,000 tons of county trash each year, said Jon Monger, director of the county’s Department of Environmental Protection.
As of now, Monger told WTOP, the county’s strategies are focused on, first, cutting the amount of trash going into the waste stream and, second, coming up with another method of dealing with waste that currently ends up going into the incinerator.
“We are very, very focused on evaluating what the options are for different systems that we could use,” he said.
Currently, Monger said, Montgomery County recycles 45% of its waste, outstripping the national recycling rate of 32%.
“We have a lot to celebrate in Montgomery County about how we recycle and reuse our materials, and everybody that lives and works here should be very proud of the progress that we’ve made as a community,” Monger said, adding, “There’s going to be more to come.”
Monger said the extension of the agreement with Reworld Montgomery could go until April of 2031, but there is the possibility of early termination.
“There are technologies out there that we’re, again, still in the process of evaluating, that will allow us to drastically reduce the volume of trash even after consumers throw things away,” he said, noting there’s a multistep process underway, including evaluating what would work best and then developing the infrastructure needed to process that trash.
“We are committed to finding innovative solutions to waste management and enhancing sustainability in Montgomery County,” County Executive Elrich said in a statement released on Nov. 25. “This extension allows us the time needed to evaluate and implement the best available new technologies that will help us transition to a more sustainable future while ensuring that we maintain the safe, efficient operation of our waste management system in the interim.”
Noting the industrial zoning in Dickerson, and expected future facilities, like a data center, Findlay said, “We feel we do our part up here as all these things benefit the entire county.”
So closing the incinerator, he said, “is a priority.”
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